1057 Dicks. Bonnie Blue: Performance Art, Comedy, or Covert Digital Oppression?

The parallels with the Gisele Pelicot case cannot be a coincidence. It’s like an inverted mirror. But is Bonnie Blue the end of feminism, a gay icon, or a slapstick comedy genius?

“What’s this Bonnie Blue?” says Mum, walking across her sculpture studio with a plate of biscuits. “She’s all over the radio. Is it one of these things like James and the Giant Centipedes?” she asks.

Bonnie is from Nottinghamshire, like us, so the local radios are showing a lot of interest. “No she’s a porn star from Stapleford who had sex with over 1000 men Mum” I say, quietly turning a page of Thomas Hardy in her studio’s arm chair “And you’re thinking of The Human Centipede”

“Stapleford” Mum repeats, “Yes, that’s the wrong side of the canal” she nods as if this explains things. She carries on sawing wood. Bonnie Blue grew up just 1 kilometre away from us, near Attenborough Nature Reserve where people go bird watching, we were both walking there yesterday and Mum had a piss in the wood before saying “Catch that in your binoculars lads!”

If the artist Marina Ambromovich had sex with over 1,000 men and called it “1000 Little Deaths”, the Royal Academy would sell limited edition tote bags, Dame Tracey Emin would cut the ribbon on the ball sack of the first stooge with his Matalan pants down (if you thought Bonnie was distressed, wait until you see the jeans) It would be ART. But if a fake-tanned blond does it for commercial reasons, making some money on a streaming service, well - that’s disgusting and immoral. And yet, she’s a free woman, some say. You can’t lock her up for having sex. And if you did, she’d probably just go and make a lesbian masterpiece in HM Prison Holloway.

I Google this Bonnie, because I hadn't heard of her either before Nottingham FM, her name sounds like one of those novels you see for £1.50 in ASDA about a Scottish milk maid who elopes with a sea captain. Essentially Mum’s instinct is correct, Bonnie Blue is shock-value, not unlike the marketing around The Human Centipede. Entertainment no longer lives on the big screen, its home is the internet. Bonnie’s porn is aimed at school boys, but has been picked up by the papers now and amplified for effect and now here we are, the bored middle classes, competing with our sighs about it and perhaps a dash of encrypted envy. It turns out that she has been doing these Only Fans stunts for for a while, just a few miles away from where me and Mum sit eating our casserole on a Sunday. Bonnie is out there in a rented bungalow with a queue of loosely anonymous men queueing to have sex with her.

The parallels with the Gisele Pelicot case, cannot be a coincidence. The French woman who was drug-raped against her own will and knowledge by a string of men under her husband’s supervision, is almost being reinterpreted here, it feels, by Bonnie, or the editors zooming in on her. The Bonnie Blue operation is consensual, assuming Bonnie is mentally well, but the imagined visuals are chillingly similar. It’s like an inverted mirror of the same case. As if the media is saying “Look… some girls like it like that, okay” The Bonnie Blue story is a tug-of-war step.

But of course behind the hysteria and thrill, websites like the Mirror and the Star make you click away your own digital consent, so that they can harvest your personal life for gain.

I'm interested in mass media, how most of the things that we hold in our fleshy heads we have never actually seen with our own eyes or touched with our fingers, but simply engaged with, via screens across the internet. Bonnie Blue is pixels, she is data, she is a URL.

Later that day I see the story again - “Bonnie Blue, woman has sex with 1057 men” - on Facebook, a news website has promoted it via their Facebook page into my feed, has paid for my eyes to see it instead of updates from my real life friends. Isn’t that a little strange? Over 16,000 people have commented in just over an hour. Bonnie’s sex marathon is a catalyst for a much bigger event. The social media onslaught, a digital attack on our time and on our brains.

Mum’s radio, then my Facebook’s feed, the third Bonnie Blue mention that hits me on this cold January day is on Jimmy Carr’s TikTok. I’ve worked with Jimmy before at The Clapham Grand, and so I follow him. I’m going to come clean - I’ve been a small fan of Jimmy’s for over 20 years - first buying a ticket to see him at my school theatre in Oakham, where he headlined a summer festival when I was just fifteen. Older bullies at school used to call me “Pigeon Boy” back then, because of how I looked and walked as a kid, boys tried to stamp out my creativity, darken my heart, and take the shine out of my eyes at a young age. One of the older boys at school asked Jimmy Carr, unexpectedly during the Q&A, in our school theatre in front of everyone, while pointing at me, if I looked like a pigeon. People chuckled and Jimmy Carr looked at me sympathetically and then turned back and said to the prefect - “No, but you do sound like a cunt mate”, and the whole school laughed. Jimmy saved me. I was now the hero of a failed swipe. Although I wouldn’t have phrased it like this then, I saw how important comedians were in governing public opinion, standing up to power, and blocking twats - reminding us that stories are just stories. Narratives can be flipped and changed. Years later, I was with Jimmy, hanging out backstage on the show 8 Out Of 10 Cats, and I thanked him, but of course he had no recollection. For every time a comedian gets in trouble, there might be 100 undocumented times in which they made someone’s day.

What’s interesting about the Jimmy Carr clip on Bonnie Blue is that he instinctively defends her too, saying “I’m very sex positive, and I’m sure she made a tonne of money doing that” before turning the topic on the questioner, suggesting cheekily that she tries it too, and then posing a philosophical question - Is sex with one man for 12 hours, any different to sex with 1000 for a minute each? “It’s the same sum” - he jokes.

Radio. Facebook. TikTok. Beyond the reach of Bonnie’s men and their feeble orgasms, a longer queue is starting to form…

In Berlin, there is a famous nightclub called Berghain, and in the basement there (accessed by its own door, and much easier to get into than Berghain itself, in case you fancy it) is a male-only sex club called Laboratory. Thursday night is naked night and you will see a few hundred men in low lamplight and techno having sex - literally everywhere. On raised gym mats, in leather slings (which are like purpose-designed hammocks), there are men rattling in cages that you stand on top of or walk underneath, men against the wall in dark alcoves, bent over industrial pipes, men passed out on sofas, men on leads. And yes - some men have a queue. I’ve been there myself, sending one chap on his way with a peck on the cheek, and then melting into the next. You also see permitted violence here and there, spanking and restraint, a hand around a neck. But much louder than the techno or the groaning, or the smell of sweat, is the sense of community and friendliness. Naked men stand around in just their Caterpillar boots, sharing fags (interpret as you will) in the smoking area, touching each other on ecstasy, and talking about Chapelle Roan or Charli XCX, what they made of the Wicked Movie, or swapping their summer holiday plans. “How’s your father’s cancer?” I heard one man ask another in a pig mask.

Last time I went to Laboratory I was offered visits to Estonia, Latvia and New York, it’s an international hub of love. Americans who visit Berlin gay clubs can sometimes be seen giggling, absolutely gob-smacked, struggling to process the fantasia all around them, what gay sexual liberation looks like in its truest, highest form. It's so sleazy, Berlin, that it becomes almost spiritual. You leave Laboratory feeling temporarily fixed and reset, buzzing with memories and furnished with new friends. With men who have sex with men, you see a portrait of what men want from each other and enjoy. But when it’s men with women, in a modern setting, there’s clearly a bit of a dilemma, for some. Straight people in the West are in the process or renegotiating what sex looks like. The media, unhelpfully or perhaps importantly, are finding extreme scenarios and holding them into a bright light, while taking our data and bleaching our minds. Each frenzy instructs the media how to play it next.

I am aware that I am a man, and so I cannot comprehensively “weigh in” on the Bonnie thing. I am not a woman. More than that, I am a gay man. Upon seeing a photo of the room in which Bonnie’s stunt took place, I didn’t feel turned on or scandalised, my first thought was “Ooh look at that parquet flooring.. where’s that?”

The answer incidentally: a dreary “playboy mansion”, belonging to ‘Fast Eddie Davenport’, a once beautiful house which apparently the police have been called to 63 times (although whether that’s to join a queue I’m not sure)

In the musical Six - hear me out - Henry VIII’s wives decipher that they, not Henry, are the story. The fact that Henry has 6 wives is what makes Henry VIII so interesting, and much more famous than his predecessor (the one that looks like Dot Cotton) and his successor (the twink under the staircase) No matter how many monasteries he destroys, it is his polyamory that sticks. But of course most English kings had strings of mistresses, Henry’s difference was he went and married them, he used his marriage bed to make a theological statement, it was destroying a monastery, it was all part of the same war.

Similarly, with Bonnie Blue, it is the sheer amount of men who make this a story, it knowingly touches a nerve and goes against what we are taught.

In Bonnie’s previous films (I read her Wikipedia page) the sex is also made noteworthy by facts related to who is fucking her - they’re college boys in one, husbands in another, or they’re university lecturers. Bonnie’s videos cleverly play with the male psyche, they are defined not so much by her as by the way in which she casts men, and like all things that straight men love (football, wrestling, Nazis, Jimmy Carr) - it’s a teeny bit gay.

There's a repressed homosexual appeal in seeing a parade of so many naked guys having sex with the same woman, like a queer vampire communion. She is a working class budget answer to Lily Rose Depp in Nosferatu.

Do we get to see their arses in the video, these men? I wonder how many gays have paid to see the video or hunted it down online for their own gay reasons? Straight porn often accidentally showcases beautiful men, all the sexier for being out of reach to us in day-to-day life. Similarly, straight women sometimes watch gay porn because it features men who you can actually envisage liking - what a bold concept. It’s the media who shapes the sneering narrative, but to me this video of Bonnie’s sounds kinda camp, it’s almost - comedy? There’s something a bit Carry On about it. And carry on they did.

Bonnie Blue is acting like a gay man in Berlin, albeit it with a much higher fuck count, and organised in a way that most gay men couldn't be arsed with. “1057” - Girl… Eurovision is the only night of the year that we count anything okay. Douze points for Azerbaijan is as high as we go. My ex messaged me saying he doesn’t believe Bonnie’s total 1057.

It sounds fake, doesn’t it, the 57 tacked on as an attempt at authenticity. Purely in terms of logistics, it doesn’t feel right for a private event in a London house. Who are these 1000 men? Where did they come from? Have you seen the state of Uber in London these days? 12 hours? How did they all get there? Is that why Timothee Chamalet was spotted on a Lime bike?

Gay men have these kinda ticketed sex events, and 500 attendees is a good day. No offence to straight guys, but I highly doubt 1057 of you can be arsed to pay a congestion charge just to join a slow conga of hairy butts. Straight men enjoy Freeview, peanut M&Ms, and beer. This anonymous sex event community is more niche than the papers would have you think. Most Gen-Z boys are into boardgames, they chop parsley and cos-play the 1950s.

But I don’t want to disrespect women, writing these sporadic Substack thoughts. I am not totally naive. Bonnie Blue’s stunt isn't quite the same as a gay jolly in Berlin or Vauxhall is it, because she is knowingly conducting a stunt that will be used by mass media to make a potentially unhelpful statement about women in general. This will also quickly translate into playground jibes and cause upset to young girls who are just trying to go about their day. It's hard to fully grasp the social impact. In the world of sexual liberation and feminism, Bonnie is potentially a Franz Ferdinand here, the catalyst for a chain of events that we cannot gauge just yet. Or maybe the world has always been like that?

I typed her name into TikTok and watched some of her stuff, not her sex tapes, but her selfie chats and such. The first video that came up was something about “schoolies” in which she was hyping up a sex tape involving school boys, which sets a worrying precedent that in theory can be reversed - she is okaying sex with school girls too you could argue? Her second video is a warning to “Karens” - a tongue-in-cheek slur used to attack ‘basic’ straight women. In gay land people use the word “Karen” to describe different types of unruly, often working class, middle aged women. A bed and breakfast landlady who won’t let you and your partner have a double bed is a “Karen”. A woman in a cocktail bar who steals your stool and won’t give it back might also be a “Karen”. Bonnie tells Karens to stop judging her, it’s not her fault Karen’s husband wants to bang her. She is being a comedian here, she is masterfully tapping in to the language of TikTok, engaging people and stirring the shit, but at the same time she is undeniably down-talking women too, taking the piss out of their morals and fears. In going on the defensive she also accidentally slips and flaunts a few of her own insecurities, which media bosses will not miss. Bonnie Blue can be pushed, and twisted, she has the potential to lash out, and so she is putty in Murdoch’s hands. Is Bonnie really in charge? Or is she as disposable as the condoms scattered all around her on the parquet floor? A lamb arranging her own slaughter?

Or is Bonnie a superhero of sorts, a modern day DIY Warhol superstar, using sex and studio flashbulbs, the ceaseless screech of mass media and the stagnant stench of nouveau puritans to catapult her name into the sky, challenging the norms, and opening peoples eyes, one dirty pay check at a time.

Talking of which, Sarah Vine had a field day in her plummy Daily Mail column all about Bonnie, declaring that Only Fans should be shut down! She echoed my suspicion that Bonnie’s video could have a negative effect on girls, although Sarah over-egged of course, which is her job, saying that Bonnie is “putting lives at risk”, which she must know a thing or two about as a Daily Mail columnist.

I feel bad for Sarah Vine because she spent twenty years ironing Michael Gove’s socks, only to be dumped and upgraded for a younger model at the final hurdle, as was the trend for BoJo’s cabinet. Sarah Vine knows what it is like to try and do things the correct way with a man and ultimately still get nowhere. She has a whole page of wrath for Bonnie and attacks Only Fans, the female-owned porn service which helps sluts find financial independence, but Sarah offers no alternative realistic solutions. We can’t all shack up with an Education Secretary and whine for a living Although who knows what Bonnie’s filming next. Maybe Michael Gove is preparing the bowls of Twiglets and laying out the lube sachets as we speak. Clearly the real problem isn’t Bonnie here, or the webcam platform that she’s using, but…

A) SOME men

And

B) The media circus feeding off her, a tedious pearl-clutching pantomime in which Sarah Vine herself plays a profitable part. Sarah Vine loves shit like this, a Meal for 1 from Waitrose and then voice-type a dark rant from the bathtub for the Mail. Ka-ching. Thanks Bonnie!

Bonnie should not be allowed to cash in on having sex with 1000 men, but Sarah Vine’s newspaper The Daily Mail, can cash in on fucking with a million minds every day.

Good vibes porn star, or vitriolic Daily Mail typist. I know who I’d choose as my babysitter.

I’m not sure there’s an answer here to the Bonnie Blue conundrum, because as with all major media hoo-hars, there isn’t really a question.

Bonnie Blue.

Nottingham’s biggest name since Robin Hood. Steals from the rich, and gives to the poor… like you’ve never seen before. (I hope you’ve had your Weetabix)

Sam Taylor-Johnson must be scrabbling for the film rights to Bonnie Blue. Maybe she’ll meet her next husband in the queue of horny school boys, Aaron must be hitting his sell-by-date.

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